


Church Bells

by boredealis



Category: Baby Driver (2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 08:15:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11413860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boredealis/pseuds/boredealis
Summary: The song was over. All that style was stripped away, exposing the raw skin underneath. After it all, they were only who they were when it had started. The moment she had first visited him in jail was the moment she knew that they were two strangers, sitting across from each other, with little to say at all.





	Church Bells

Baby was all style. The layers of it plastered him, saran wrap, coating the figure that lay beneath. There was the music, always perfectly and meticulously chosen. There were the sunglasses, hiding the clear color of his eyes. There were his dances, which he used to glide by the things that were dirty and scary and bloodstained. Every part of his life was one of those dances. The heart-pounding car chases, the days he brought coffee marked with his name to murderers, the moments he brought his lips to meet hers. It was so, so easy to get caught up in it. She was dangerous, loyal, flawless, the girl at the diner that the bad boy with a heart of gold loved till the end.

The song was over. All that style was stripped away, exposing the raw skin underneath. After it all, they were only who they were when it had started. The moment she had first visited him in jail was the moment she knew that they were two strangers, sitting across from each other, with little to say at all.

Sometimes, she thought that it would have been better to die. To have ridden that high until the crescendo, and then let herself fall to darkness in a powerful ending note. But life is not a song, and things rarely end easily or neatly. There’s always the ragged edges, always the odd awkward bits in the middle, always the bad parts that can’t be chipped or cut away.

The song makes for a better story, though.

* * *

Ba–Miles–Baby started therapy, in prison. It was court mandated, imposed as a condition for a reduced sentence. It seemed to help, required though it was. They talked more easily, now, without his fingers banging out a drumbeat to music he couldn’t hear so well anymore.

They took away his ear buds when he went inside. Thought he could use them to hang himself.

“It’s like there’s two of me,” he confessed one frosty morning. The summer had faded into fall, then into cold winter. Life had seemed easier, better, with the blazing sun above.

“Two of you?”

“There’s Baby, and there’s Miles.” He was tapping his fingers, again. Getting nervous. She laced her fingers within his to stop the tapping. “I don’t know which one I am anymore.”

“Why can’t you be both?”

He ignored her. “It used to be easy.” A pause. He had a way of talking, like the conversation was actually lyrics to a song nobody else knew was playing. “It was so easy, being Baby, because I didn’t have to remember my Mom. My…Dad. But now, when I close my eyes, I see them.”

He didn’t have to elaborate.

Leon Jefferson, the rude man plastered with tattoos. She’d slapped that check for Cokes down on the table right in front of him, not knowing just how close to death she’d gotten. Baby called him “Bats” with an odd note in his voice. Every news story talked about his troubled childhood, his struggles with mental illness and drug addiction. They also talked about all the police officers he’d killed, all of the civilians, all of the people just trying to live honestly and provide for their families. She didn’t know much about him; only that Baby had brutally killed him when he slammed his foot on a gas pedal. She didn’t feel sorry about that. She also knew that Baby woke up screaming some nights, remembering the sound as the rebar sheared through Bats’ body.

Monica Costello, the beautiful woman with the poison tongue and the long, shining hair. Darling, to Deborah. Her profile on the news showed a woman who’d been dealt nasty cards. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, and the slow slide into sex work. She’d taken it all and turned it outwards. Her hands and sexuality became weapons of similar caliber. She’d died in a shootout with the cops, taking two of them with her. There was a tribute to the two officers who died on the news. One of them had a four-year-old daughter. People left teddy bears on the police officer’s grave.

Jason Van Horne, the Wall Street trader. He was a natural born grifter, born with a white collar around his neck and a silver spoon in his mouth. He’d taken everything he had been given, and wasted it. Deborah knew people like him, knew them like the back of her hand. People who would take and take and take, and it would never be enough for them. Buddy, as Baby called him, would consume money, drugs, sex, and love, and would never be anything but empty. Baby said Buddy had loved Darling, but there was a fine line between love and obsession. Darling was another thing to Buddy—a thing to be cherished and protected, sure, but yet another thing. “You took something from me,” Buddy had said, a few moments before Deborah had brought that crowbar down on his skull. Perhaps there were different kinds of love in the world. But Deborah didn’t know how love could be so selfish, so spiteful, so unkind to the world around it.

Then, the man Baby referred to only as “Doc.” He’d never appeared on the news. “They wiped him away,” Baby had said. “He had every cop in his pocket.” He’d saved her life, and Baby’s, throwing himself into the danger like that was what he had been born to do. “I was in love once,” he’d said. He’d said like he knew something that only the luckless get to grasp—knew that love, real love, was not always a good thing.

Baby remembered them. He remembered all of them, and he told her often. They’d been a part of him. The largest, loudest parts of them had been a part of his dance. But it was the small things that Baby truly remembered. Moments of kindness. A shared song, a kind word, a chance given.

“He—I killed them.” The corners of Baby’s mouth dragged downwards. The scars and worry lines, evidence of the things he couldn’t forget, marred his pretty face. “I killed them, I killed them all. It was me.”

“No.” She held on tighter, leaning in to touch his face. Her fingers barely touched him, feather light as they brushed his pale cheek. She closed her eyes, and felt his face crumple beneath her fingers. “No, they killed themselves. They put themselves in danger, they killed people, it was _them_.”

“I should have died.”

Deborah paused. “No,” she said. _Maybe_ , she meant. When Dad had died…no, don’t think about that. “No. You’re alive. I’m alive. We’re here, together. Don’t you feel me?”

She grabbed his hand, put it on her chest so he could feel her heartbeat. His fingers curled, blunt fingernails tracing the skin right over her heart. Other prisoners with visitors leered or frowned in their direction, but she let her gaze slide past them.

“Do you feel it?” she asked, again.

Baby smiled, faintly. “The beat. Yes.”

“It’s all for you.”

“Yeah.” His words were directed at her, but his eyes were on the window. Watching the world go by. After driving so fast, for so long, now his life was a snail’s pace. It was Deborah’s turn to slam her foot on the gas.

* * *

There were support groups for people with their loved ones in prison. She went to one, but too often bit her tongue. These were innocent people, for the most part. They were desperately confused and shocked. They had no part in what had been done. And what was Deborah to say? That she’d slammed her car into someone? That she’d attacked a man with a crowbar? That she’d driven a fugitive away from the scene of the crime, and would have driven him anywhere, if he hadn’t stopped her?

There was very little to say. So she said nothing instead.

When she left the group, it was the wrong time of day to visit Baby. She sat in her car for a while, fiddling with the stereo. All of Baby’s possessions had been seized, including the iPods, all lovingly filled with his music. The tape of his mother was taken too, as part of the evidence, though they had promised to give it back. No song seemed right, so she drove to the sound of the engine instead.

She found herself where she promised she wouldn’t go.

She climbed out of her car, and strode past the hulking stones. She came to a halt at a plot. There was no grass there yet, only weeds. There was no stone, either. Only a small copper marker, marking it as Leon Jefferson’s resting place.

She stood, head bent. She thought about how she’d testified for Baby, telling the judge that he was a good man, that he deserved a second chance. How many second chances did most people get? Did Bats even get a first one?

“I saw you at the trial.”

Deborah jumped a mile. She turned to see a girl—maybe her age, maybe a bit older—walking to stand beside her. She had dark curly hair, dark skin, and dark eyes. Her gaze was flat and resigned.

“The trial?” Deborah asked.

“The sentencing.” The girl shrugged. “For the driver.”

“Oh.” The driver. An appropriate summary for Baby, Deborah supposed. 

They stood in cold silence. The girl had her eyebrows raised, like she was waiting for Deborah to say something, daring her to criticize. But when Deborah said nothing, the girl simply turned and sighed. “He was a good Dad, you know.”

There was something tight in Deborah’s throat. She swallowed past it.

“He was a good Dad,” the girl said, again. “He wasn’t perfect. But he tried, you know? On the weekends. We’d go…bowling, he had his own ball. People thought he was scary, because he had a lot of tattoos, because he talked real tough. And he did…bad things, a lot of bad things. But he was still my Dad.”

“Sometimes good people do bad things,” Deborah offered.

The girl stared down at the fresh earth, the copper marker. There were no flowers in her hands. “He wasn’t a good person.” She shuffled her feet, knocking the toes of her boots against the ground. “But I still loved him.”

“How do you know? That he wasn’t a good person.”

The girl stared Deborah in the eyes, some of the anger coming back. “Good people don’t hurt other people.”

Deborah’s testimony. How had it felt for this girl to hear how good her Dad’s killer was? How kind, how special, how loved?

“I’m not sorry,” Deborah said.

“Then why are you here?”

Deborah didn’t have an answer for her. The girl shook her head, and walked away instead. 

* * *

Music crept in, of course. Not often, but in ripples and waves. Deborah could barely listen to the oldies on the radio anymore. Couldn't sing them anymore. Every song about sunshine and driving fast cars made her sick to her stomach. She stuck to country instead, the songs that she grew listening to with Dad…no, don’t think about that. The guitar twanged, the music was simple and quiet.

She wrote Baby about the music she heard. With the postcards. Someday, that music would be all his again. There wasn’t much of it in prison, not much of anything that he loved, so she tried her best with what they had. And, every day, she tried to find something new she loved about him. He was endlessly sweet, of course. The sweet, gentle man she'd fallen in love with. It was hard to believe that someone so kind could do things as brutally as he did, but every person is full of contradictions. Sometimes murderers make good Dads. Sometimes husbands and wives love each other to pieces, literally. Sometimes mob bosses save you in the end. 

His therapy was helping, he told her. The pills too. She tried to believe him.

“Will this erase it?”

It was one of their rare visits. She was showing him some of her newest postcards—she planned to take him to the West Coast, California, and drive along Big Sur.

“Will what erase it?” she said, absently.

“Will being in prison get rid of what I did?” He had his eyes on the window again, not on her fingers, her lips. “Will I wake up one day and everyone will forgive me? Will I deserve you?”

The postcard was thick under her fingertips. She turned it over, looking at the lack of writing underneath. Bats’ daughter probably visited his grave often. That postal worker probably still had nightmares about that officer who died in her arms. The families of the officers who died would probably never get over what they had lost. “No,” she said, slowly. “Not everything will be forgiven.”

Baby’s face fell. He was hopelessly naïve, a child. He’d seen people die but had never truly felt it. The world had left its mark, sure, but the child had never truly left him. The child who watched movies and thought that that was how it ended.

“Not by everyone,” she continued. “But you have to forgive yourself. That’s the only thing you can do.”

“What if I can’t?”

She took a deep breath. Wrapped her hands around his, again. “You have to.”

“Okay,” he said, too easily. He didn’t understand. That was okay. They had time. He looked down at the postcards, again. “So what after California?”

She forced a smile. He needed this. She needed this. “We’ll go North. See the mountains.”

“Mountains,” he breathed. “I’ve seen pictures.”

“And snow,” she said. “Lots of snow. We’ll go to the lake, too. They have such blue lakes. Like your eyes.” She shuffled to find the postcard, pushing that bright blue image into his hand.

“Mountains,” he said again.

“Just you and me.”

Not with  _them_. Never _them_. Perhaps they’d never leave him. But Baby didn’t have to be two people, Miles and Baby. Maybe he could be both, and neither. Maybe she could infuse his name with new meaning, a new way of saying it. Maybe Baby could be something new. Something all hers, instead. Take back all those pieces of him that they tore away when they died. 

She leaned forward to kiss him. When she pulled back, she asked, “How’s the ringing?”

“Not so loud, today. Not with you.”

“What did you say it was like? With me?"

“Like church bells.”

“Like church bells,” she repeated, and kissed him again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading. Feedback is loved.


End file.
